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Development on the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin has been moving along at a steady pace, and the latest release marks the completion of another great feature for the Sound Indicator replacement applet.

What’s New?

New Feature: Multimedia Key Support

Multimedia keyboard support has been hit and miss in the Linux space for as long as there’s been multimedia keyboards. Support for these keys has been entirely dependent on support baked into each individual application. The best current example of this is the Spotify Linux client. Users can control the media player with various panel plugins, but not with their keyboards.

With the new multimedia key support in Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3, the recently added MPRIS2 integration has been complemented with key bindings for the Play/Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop keys. When these keys are pressed, any actively running player known to the plugin will be notified, enabling keyboard playback control.

You can check out the new feature in the video below, where I very excitedly inundate my media players with playback commands.

General Improvements

Simplified device menus: The bold section headers have been replaced in favor of a single menu per input and output device. If there’s only one option available, the menu is no longer displayed.

Improved volume scale increments: The old defaults were steps of 6% and a max of 153%. These seemed a bit unusual, and have been replaced with a more sensible 5% and 150%.

Most of this post is fairly old news, but still worth to be mentioned.

Also as a small gimmick (and because it was requested in my previous post), here is a gif of the new slide-out animation of xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0

I have read your comments and bugreports and have already been working towards some further improvements of notifyd, so I guess 0.4.1 is around the corner.

Finally, here goes the “historic news”.

xfce4-panel 4.13.1

After a longer waiting time I pushed out another development release of the panel. This one includes among as major change the port to GDBus, which was done by Ali. This means the panel now depends on xfconf 4.13 – recommended is at least 4.13.3 – and is not compatible anymore with xfconf 4.12.

A lot of bugfixes and translation updates accumulated over the last months since 4.13.0, the most prominent one is the fix of drag and drop (one of the bigger known regressions of the Gtk+3 port) thanks to Peter. A nice new improvement is the re-ordering of systray items, which was implemented by Viktor.

xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.2

We’ve had a lot of problems with keyboard shortcuts not working reliably with the panel plugin and systray version of clipman so Mike rolled up his sleeves and ported both to GtkApplication. I haven’t had a problem with my keyboard shortcuts since!

Greybird 3.22.5

This release features some small improvements including slimmer CSD/headerbars to save some vertical pixels, initial support for Xfdesktop 4.13 to help all testers of Xfce’s development releases and finally a fix for message dialog buttons.

I have since then been working towards supporting Thunar’s Gtk+3 port better in Greybird, which will be included in the next release.

This has been a comparatively quiet development cycle for Xubuntu. With increased development on Xfce as we prepare for Xfce 4.14, less Xubuntu-specific changes took place this cycle. Thankfully, there are still plenty of goodies to get excited about.

Appearance Updates: Greybird‘s client side decorations (CSD) have been refreshed and now consume much less space. elementary-xfce, our preferred icon theme, has been updated and includes new device, mimetype, and panel icons. And we have a fancy new wallpaper.

Application Updates: This is the first release of Xubuntu to feature GNOME Font Viewer, a handy tool for font management. LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest versions (5.4, 56, and 52.4 respectively). On the Xfce side, Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, Mount Plugin, Exo, and Tumbler have been updated to take advantage of the latest GTK+ version and continue the march toward Xfce 4.14.

Screenshots

Download

Download Xubuntu 17.10 from Xubuntu.org. It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.

What’s Next?

After the release festivities calm down, work will begin on Xubuntu 18.04, our next LTS release. These are always our most active cycles as we polish the work that we’ve been doing the past 18 months and prepare for a 3-year support window. A few things we already have planned…

Replacing the Sound Indicator with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin, a very capable replacement with more features landing soon.

Replacing the Xfce Indicator Plugin with the Xfce StatusNotifier Plugin, a fully compatible and better maintained plugin with a few new tricks.

After quite some development time I have decided to push out xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0 today. This is not just a bugfix, but a feature-packed release.

Panel plugin

Among the biggest changes there is a panel plugin which displays the most recent notifications as well as allowing for quick access to the do-not-disturb mode. It also serves as a status indicator for the do-not-disturb mode, so you can easily see whether notifications are shown or hidden overall.

The new panel plugin

Improved logging

I’ve also spent some time on improving the notification image handling in the log. While handling icon-names is easy (just save them as string) handling the pixbufs was a little more challenging. I decided to do it the Git way and deduplicate these pixbufs based on their (unique) hashes, so that each picture would only be saved once. All of those pictures end up in a sub-directory of the log (which by default is ~/.cache/xfce4/notifyd/icons). Currently there is no monitoring of how much space these images consume and no button to clear them away, maybe I’ll add that later if people feel it would be useful/necessary. After using this feature for several months I have accumulated less than 7MB.
The log also received some more love in terms of markup support and character escaping. Multi-line notifications should now be correctly logged.

New animation: slide-out

Just for the fun of it I also worked out a new animation optional addon to the standard fade-out. I called it slide-out and it’s a fairly wide-spread animation mix of fade-out and sliding the bubble (depending on its location on the screen of course) off-screen.

New logo

As this turned out to be a bigger release I went for a bigger version jump and also included the new logo I had been working on for a while. I evaluated several “notification” metaphors and went for the ‘ol bell (notification bubbles felt a little odd and not easy to depict, as they look usually very diverse).

Bugfixes

Some people may be happy to know that I dropped the feature that let xfce4-notifyd exit after 10 minutes of inactivity. I can only guess but I presume this was implemented to save resources. Nowadays it feels more annoying if a daemon has to be restarted and the first notification that’s that split-second longer to appear.

A few more tweaks have been done to the geometry of the notification bubble windows to not take more space than needed and distribute things evenly (no more strange margins) and the configuration dialog now shows a warning if xfce4-notifyd is not detected as running.

Download

As always, you can download and build/install the tarball or wait for your favorite distribution to package and ship it to you.

A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.

Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin

This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.

Features

Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond

Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle

Launch the configured audio mixer

Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)

Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)

Screenshots

Downloads

The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.

Xfce 4.14 development has been picking up steam in the past few months. With the release of Exo 0.11.3, things are only going to get steamier.

What is Exo?

Exo is an Xfce library for application development. It was introduced years ago to aid the development of Xfce applications. It’s not used quite as heavily these days, but you’ll still find Exo components in Thunar (the file manager) and Xfce Settings Manager.

Exo provides custom widgets and APIs that extend the functionality of GLib and GTK+ (both 2 and 3). It also provides the mechanisms for defining preferred applications in Xfce.

What’s New in Exo 0.11.3?

New Features

exo-csource: Added a new --output flag to write the generated output to a file (Xfce #12901)

exo-helper: Added a new --query flag to determine the preferred application (Xfce #8579)

Bug management is a vital part of any open source project. Today I’m happy to introduce you to yet another project which aims to improve the Xfce infrastructure – you guessed it – the Xfce Bugzilla!

The project to improve the Xfce bug management started quite some time ago. The first tasks in this were unrelated to the infrastructure; the team has done some work to clean up old bugs as well as triaging newer ones. Tasks like that can become extremely tedious if the tools are constantly slowing you down.

To try to remedy this situation we started a project to improve the look and feel of Bugzilla. In addition to just a general facelift we also ended up reorganizing bits here and there and even touch some functionality. I specifically want to highlight a few parts of the project:

Make bug filing easier and faster than before. We’ve streamlined the bug filing process by removing one unnecessary page load and a click but also by doing a big reorganization in the bug filing page.

Make bug handling easier and faster than before. In addition to a revamp for the bug filing procedure, the individual bug report pages have had a big update as well; information is now more clearly organized and the long bug description and comments have been brought much closer to the top of the page. We have also merged the status and resolution fields to let you choose the right combination with less clicks – and make it obvious which combinations are possible…

Allow using search filters on-the-fly. Whenever you are on a search result page with any filters, you can remove them individually from the search. You can now also click the product, component and assignee fields to add additional filters.

Highlight bug statuses. This is a smaller update, but we’re now using color-coded boxes for bug statuses anywhere they are shown. This should both help users digest information and see where work needs to be done.

Today, we’re finally at the point where we are quite happy with the changes and are ready to make them the default for the Xfce Bugzilla – all users using the default theme have been converted to the new Xfce skin and templates related to this skin. If you have specifically selected any other theme, you will be still using that; if you want to see the new theme, please go change your preferences.

We hope you like the new improvements and that they can make your life easier. As always, if you find any weirdness or bugs with the new skin and templates, file them in Bugzilla against the Bugzilla product on Xfce Bugzilla. Please note that this is not the correct place for bugs about Bugzilla itself – a good way to find out whether something is affecting the Xfce skin and related templates is to check the functionality with another skin enabled.